F 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap.f?.2'£iCopyright No.,„ 
Shelf.^i/_£r_B S 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Newport 



American 

Summer 

Resorts 



The North Shore. By Robert 
Grant. 
With Illustrations by ^V. T. Smed- 

LEY. 

Newport. By W. C. Brovvnell. 
With Illustrations by W. S. Van- 
DERBiLT Allen. 

Bar Harbor. By F. Marion Craw- 
ford. 
With Illustrations by C. S. Rein- 

HART. 

Lenox. By George A. HiBBARD. 

With Illustrations by W. S. Van- 
derbilt Allen. 

^^■^ Each i2mo. Cloth. Price, 75 cents 



AMERICAN SUMMER RESORTS 



N E JV P O R T 



if' 



BY 



W, C, BROWNELL 



ILLUSTRATED BT 

W. S. VANDERBIUr ALLEN 






IpU^^O-J' 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

NEIV YORK MDCCCXCVI 



\^- 



Cofy right, iSg./, iSgb, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



F81 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



BcUevue Avenue — Afternoon 

An Afternoon Spin . 

The Casino ^adrangle — Morning 

Exercising the Thoroughbreds . 

The Ball-roo7n of the Casino 

In Front of the Casino 

An Old Revolutionary House . 

On the Cliffs 

Scene on the Beach . 

Bass-fishing Stand . 

Yacht Club and Landing Stage . 

Yachting . . . • 



Page 

Frontispiece 

5 
II 

19 
23 
2g 

37 
43 

53 
61 

7^ 

75 




AjLant'C 



The 
Stage 
and the 
Spectacle 



A 



NEWPORT 

I 

THE STAGE AND THE SPECTACLE 

beneficent fairy of gesthetlc predilec- 
tions could not have arranged a 
composition containing more efficient con- 
trast and balance than Newport presents 
in its combination of old and new, of 
the quaint and the elegant, picturesque- 
ness and culture. Nowhere else does 
fashion rest with such feathery lightness 
on such a solid pedestal. The mundane 
extravagance gains immensely by bemg re- 
lated, seemingly at least and as to ocular 
setting, to a background of natural beauty 
and grave decorum. 

The background gains a little, too. 
The people that inhabit it, addicted as 
they are to observant criticism of " sum- 



Neivport nier visitors," nevertheless receive an elec- 
tric fillip from their contact with what is 
gay and joyous and no doubt fleeting. 
In spite of their most conscientious efforts 
they are affected in a way that broadens 
their horizon in proportion as it sharpens 
their critical faculties. They " size up " 
the brilliant butterflies that but hover 
about the lovely town a few brief months 
of the year, and in rather remorseless 
fashion ; but they are justifiably if secretly 
proud of their opportunities for doing so. 
What other city with any pretensions to be 
a watering-place has any such chance ^ 

The whole town is in consequence visibly 
braced up. The clerks in the shops along 
Thames Street betray the influence in 
their deportment. A higher standard of 
manners than would otherwise obtain is 
universally apparent. School - children, 
even, treat each other with noticeably 
more decorousness than elsewhere. The 
comedy of society, in fact, is repeated, in 
infinite and often humorous trituration. 
But the result is pleasant. The hack- 



drivers are, socially considered, poseurs. ^^^ 
They crack jokes with their fares if they J^f^;^^ 
divine responsiveness, but their self-respect Spectacle 
is still more obvious than their compan- 
ionability ; the " old Newporter " is not 
above showing the place to a party of 
negro visitors whom he drives down the 
Avenue with conspicuous good-humor, 
but it is his good-humor that is the most 
striking element of the spectacle. Even 
in such extreme instances one perceives 
the effect of the social ideal due to the 
"summer visitor." 

On the other hand, an impartial chron- 
icle must admit that the moral effect of a 
foreign body of wealth, leisure, and meas- 
urable frivolity in an environment of 
thrifty commonplace, such as indigenous 
Newport for the most part is, has its weak 
side. Brought up in more or less close 
contact with, and at any rate constant sight 
of, the attractive activities of so much ir- 
responsible wealth, the strictly Newport 
people — who once constituted a very 
honorable and peculiarly self-respecting 



Nezcport community — have suffered a sensible de- 
moralization. Not "hatred** nor "un- 
charitableness " has been the result of this 
contact with superior forces, but certainly 
"envy" has had a subtle influence, with 
the result that " Newport " has come to 
mean less to them and to others. The 
town is still — and may be in the future 
still more — an interesting place to spec- 
ulate about as a New England town of 
excellent traditions and unequalled at- 
tractions, but unquestionably it has lost 
something of its once very positive char- 
acter through contact with ideals and ex- 
amples by no means its own. Among 
the shop-keepers — especially among those 
whom recent changes in " business meth- 
ods " have rather relegated to the business 
background — and among the householders 
on the streets leading from Thames Street 
to what used to be called " the Hill,'* I 
am sure one would find an echo of such 
a judgment. 

At first sight and to those who take but 
a perfunctory view of Newport this may 



An 

Afternoon 
Spin 



'Ws 



'■hr 



*^i^ /. . .A 1 h^^'.^M^Wi\ 











seem of slight importance. But to my The 
own mind that which makes Newport '"^r, 

L and the 

what it is, is the balance hitherto main- spectacle 
tained between a self-respecting, organic, 
and permanent community and the artifi- 
cial, decorative, and more or less transitory 
element that makes it our chief watering- 
place. If the latter of these forces with- 
draws into exclusiveness, which to anyone 
who knows its composition may easily 
seem ridiculous, but which may never- 
theless occur ; or if the former declines 
into vulgarity and the loss of self-respect 
involved in the bravado of self-assertion, 
to which constant envy of what is quite 
beyond one's reach indubitably may lead, 
Newport as we know it now and have 
known it for years will certainly suffer a 
sea change. In other words, the future 
of Newport is, one must admit, consider- 
ably complicated by the peril of snobbish- 
ness, and snobbishness of both varieties 
exemplified by the Anglo-Saxon race. The 
English snob, according to an acute ob- 
server, meanly admires what is above him, 

7 



Neivport the American meanly despises what is be- 
neath him. Newport undoubtedly has its 
full share of both species, but it has also, 
I think, the unusual advantage of sincerely 
attaching both to it, with the consequent 
prospect of circumventing each of them. 

The place is supposed to owe its growth 
and eminence to the summer residents. It 
really owes these to four persons — all of 
them indigenous. They would nowadays 
be called " the Big Four." Without their 
foresight and reaUzation of its poten- 
tialities, the city would still be what it was 
before the war, when its summer life was 
almost altogether a desultory and caravan- 
sary affair. It owes them, indeed, more 
or less indirectly, the summer residents 
themselves. Without their labor of prep- 
aration and seduction, opening streets 
and drives, modelling estates out of barren 
tracts, artistically cutting up the landscape 
into attractive lots, stimulating civic Im- 
provements, making known and visually 
exhibiting the immense attractiveness of 



the place to everyone who had taste and The 
money, Newport would have been to-day ^^j],^^ 
far different in almost every trait that now Spectade 
makes it " Newport." They found their 
account in the process, of course. They 
were or became capitalists in the course of 
advancing the interests and widening the 
prospects of the town. And, naturally, 
they are now forgotten. I need mention 
but one of them ; but anyone who knows 
Newport well, or at least anyone who has 
known it as I have for upwards of thirty 
years, will appreciate what I mean to inti- 
mate in querying what the city would now 
be had it not been for the intelligence and 
enlightened enthusiasm of the late Alfred 
Smith, a man of ideas and imagination 
which, applied to anything more tangible 
and determinate than the gradual evolu- 
tion of the first watering-place in this 
country, would have given him a national 
reputation. One needs but a passing re- 
flection upon the imagination and ideas of 
our American " smart set " to assure him 
whether or no it is likely that unassisted 

9 



Newport it would have hit upon the real Eden of 
America wherein to erect its " barbarian 
castles " and display its varied and leis- 
urely activities. 

The summer residents do not all be- 
long to the " smart set," it is needless to 
say. Indeed, I doubt if any watering- 
place in the world of anything like equal 
eminence has a summer population char- 
acterized by so much elegance and refine- 
ment. There was long ago a large nucleus 
of elegance and refinement in Newport, 
and it has since grown proportionately 
with the increase of those whom envy and 
emulation have gathered around it ; but 
certainly for these latter the way was 
made easy and its advantages indicated by 
the enterprise, energy, and enthusiasm of 
the men I have alluded to. Somewhat 
mixed the summer population now un- 
doubtedly is. It has grown so large as to 
have grades and classes of its own. And 
to judge from the newspapers, which scru- 
pulously record its doings, it has posses- 




The 

Casino 
^ad- 
rangle — 
Morning 



sion of the town from June to October. The 
It has certainly worked a great change in ^"^r, 

/ & ^ and the 

the summer Hfe of the place. Spectacle 

This was always artificial and exotic, 
and always delightfully so. But the rise 
and immensely increased number of great 
fortunes have worked changes in Newport 
as they have everywhere else. Less here, 
however, than elsewhere, I am inclined to 
think, and certainly less here than is gen- 
erally supposed. It is a commonplace 
that the hotels have been supplanted by 
the cottages. The Ocean House survives 
somewhat as a landmark and a reminis- 
cence, but in obvious isolation. You can 
no longer sit on its broad piazza and 
watch with interest the serried defile of 
equipages — almost all of them readily to 
be identified. The Atlantic, the Fillmore, 
and the Bellevue are only memories, though 
to anyone who knew them even in their 
decadence and when they no longer har- 
bored Southern folk and Southern man- 
ners with all the gayety and light-hearted 
camaraderie, characteristically Southern, 
13 



Neivport they are charming memories still. Can it 
be that the hotel life of Narragansett Pier, 
for example, is a fair reproduction of its 
old-time Newport analogue ? But this is 
a question of only speculative interest. 
As a matter of fact, hotel life has disap- 
peared in Newport. 

What is curious, however, I think, is 
that so few people are alive to the fact that 
cottage life is just as feasible for persons 
of modest means. People go to James- 
town, on Conanicut Island, every summer 
and live in the hotels that have magically 
sprung up there at prices which would 
more than enable them to live in Newport 
cottages. Tastes differ proverbially, and 
I can fancy — for I have even met — people 
who preferred a Jamestown barrack to a 
Newport cottage at the same price, main- 
taining that the life was freer in James- 
town. I dare say it is ; it is freer still at 
Asbury Park, N. J. Costume and man- 
ners may both be legitimately more neg- 
liges than would be quite seemly in a 
denser population and amid surroundings 
14 



that suggest more decorum. But there T^he 
are persons to whom a certain decree of ^^^,\ 

^ , , , ^ . and the 

decorum is in itself pleasant to witness spectacle 
and practise, and to these life in Newport 
during the season may be as simple as it 
is in a village. To such persons the only 
obstacle to enjoyment is the constant 
presence of an elaborate and expensive life 
which they cannot share. This has capac- 
ities for making the envious and the 
feeble-minded, people who have no pride 
of tradition or shrewdness of philosophy 
or instinctive fastidiousness, extremely un- 
happy, no doubt. For others with small 
means the advantages of Newport are 
unequalled. The markets seem high- 
priced, especially to a New Yorker, but 
they are much more than counter-balanced 
by the low rents ; and the conveniences 
obtainable at low rentals, due to the way 
in which cottage-building has been specu- 
latively overdone, are unexampled. Bath- 
ing, rowing, sailing, driving, walking, 
picnicking are to be had in perfection, under 
a sky of infinite delicacy, in an atmosphere 
15 



Newport of unique softness, and in an environment 
of natural beauty and artistic distinction 
that exists nowhere else. 

Then there is the passing show — the 
social spectacle. The social spectacle as 
well as the summer life has greatly changed 
of recent years. Opening the Ocean 
Drive from the end of the Avenue to the 
Fort made a great difference to it. Ten 
miles more of macadam prodigiously dis- 
seminated the stately procession that used 
to pass decorously up and down the 
Avenue, turning at Bailey's Beach and at 
Kay Street where the houses ceased. 
Though the procession is much augmented 
nowadays it no longer produces the same 
effect as formerly, and has, indeed, ceased 
to be a procession ; the " establishments," 
as they used to be called, are strung along 
without cumulative effect. And owing to 
their greater number no one knows and 
can gossip about more than one in three 
of them. "Newport" seems less con- 
densed in consequence. Its old lovers 
feel a certain lack. 

i6 



The 
Shige 
and the 



The procession's smartness, too (an 
epithet, by the way, we should not have 
thought of using twenty years ago), is now Spectacle 
deeply infiltrated by plebeian elements — 
Stewart's, Hazard's, and other so-called 
" drags," with their mammoth loads of 
excursionists anxiously curious to see and 
fix in the memory the mansions they have 
read about in the Sunday papers, and also 
frequently recurrent vehicles of the ultra- 
shirt-sleeved bourgeoisie of the town itself, 
in whom the desire of parade has alto- 
gether outrun the capacity of creditably 
attaining it. These new elements " have a 
good time," in our American idiom,'and cer- 
tainly no place in our democratic country, 
not even Newport, can consistently elevate 
any ideal above that of providing people in 
general with a good time at any cost to the 
aesthetic or other sensibilities of " the rem- 
nant." Only, a laudator temporis acti in 
thinking of Newport may, perhaps, with- 
out feeling quite a snob, make the reflection 
that the present situation is the result of 
artificial rather than of natural selection. 



17 



Newport This overlay of nouvelles couches is ob- 
vious elsewhere than in the driving pro- 
cession, of course, with the result of social 
and political rather than aesthetic cheer to 
the spectator. The accursed but conve- 
nient trolley system clangs and sizzes 
through erstwhile sedate Spring Street 
and out the wide expanse of elm-lined 
Broad Street, now characteristically be- 
come Broadway. The colored population 
has increased after its prolific racial fash- 
ion, and the anomaly of a barouche full 
of darky dandies and dusky belles con- 
ducted by an Irish, or even, as I have be- 
fore mentioned, a native Newport driver, 
is a frequent phenomenon. The appalling 
excursionist from Providence and Paw- 
tucket, with his and her paper bags and 
odor of peanuts and ginger-pop, infests 
the squares, the cliffs, the beach, and 
awakens echoes with enjoyment. The 
Irish contingent has augmented propor- 
tionally with the African. The city gov- 
ernment is largely in its hands, with 
perhaps the usual consequence of its own 

i8 



Exercising 
the Thor- 
ouyhbreds 



»;vra«>; 



>^> 




The 
Stage 
and the 



prosperity and a deterioration of public 
works in general. There are larger crowds 
of expectorating loafers around the Post- Spectacle 
office and the City Hall. The commer- 
cial traveller, with his samples and his 
manners, is more numerous. In fine, the 
city is no longer, to the eye as well as in 
fact, composed of a summer aristocracy 
and a resident bourgeoisie, their self-re- 
specting admirers. It has moved with 
the rest of the world and with similar 
results. But with all its changes, which 
the dilettante or the lover of old Newport 
may deplore, it is perhaps more pre-emi- 
nently than ever the loveliest, the seren- 
est and most smiling, the most obvi- 
ously cultivated civic ensemble that the 
country possesses. 



y 



Newport 



T 



II 

THE SUMMER LIFE 

HE quality of the summer life is its 
elegance ; its defect is its artificiality. 
It is undoubtedly elegant, but its elegance 
is not quite a natural evolution. It is sur- 
rounded with ease, comfort and distinction 
not merely material, but aesthetic. Its 
stage is carpeted with the loveliest of 
lawns and decorated with the greatest 
profusion of flowers anywhere to be seen. 
It is characterized by a great deal of high- 
breeding, of decorum triumphing over 
frivolity, of taste, reserve and composure. 
A large element of it certainly is superior 
to the envious fleering or the obsequious 
flattery of vulgarity. Its self-respect is 
perfectly obvious and real. But one would 
like to see this carried a little farther, to 
the point, I mean, of unconsciousness, of 
absolute free play. Self respect is admir- 
al 



^ "^ The Ball- 
room of the 
Casino 




able, but respect for one's traditions is 
admirable also. The Newport summer 
life has traditions, and it should not aban- 
don them in the chameleon-like way char- 
acteristic of it, and appear imitative and 
artificial. It is only comparatively new, 
and yet, by its rather systematic imitation 
of what is positively old — by its studied 
modelling of itself on English country life, 
with which it really has but the most 
superficial relations in the world — it cre- 
ates the effect of a reflection and not of an 
original. In English country life the 
flowers make no such display, it is true, 
but the lawns are deeper and richer, the 
houses have infinitely older associations, 
and the entire environment is infinitely 
more established and sedate. Why aban- 
don our own heritage of vivacity and high- 
spirited decorousness in favor of an exotic 
ideal ? Anglomania is, perhaps, not con- 
spicuous in Newport, certainly not in 
comparison with the rest of the East ; 
but in Newport it is less excusable than 
elsewhere, and its effects more regrettable 
^5 



The 

Sum me* 
Life 



Neivport accordingly : in Newport more than any- 
where else with us imitation by the new 
thing of the old, failure to insist on one's 
own idiosyncrasies, and, as Arnold says 
of ritualistic practices, " vehement adop- 
tion of rites till yesterday unknown," 
seem to imply that we do not " know 
a good thing when we see it." 

So great, however, is the unifying power 
of Newport that when its summer life ap- 
pears in any concrete manifestation one 
feels that to inquire into it is eminently to 
inquire too curiously. It is true that with 
the extension of the drive, the decline of 
the hotel-life and their withdrawal from 
the beach, the summer people are certainly 
less in evidence than they were formerly. 
They make far less of a spectacle for pro- 
fane contemplation, and somewhat con- 
sciously and uneasily, perhaps, study 
exclusiveness, if not seclusion. They 
visit among themselves and have teas and 
dinners to themselves, quite as they do in 
their several winter social circles. It is 
perfectly clear that they do not have any- 
26 



thing like the good time they or their 
fathers and mothers used to have; but 
that is their. affair, and is only interesting 
as it affects and modifies " Newport." 

They still come out quite strong — as 
they are beginning to learn to say — at the 
Casino ; though the Casino has never paid 
for itself and is a monument to the unwis- 
dom of its originators' efforts to domes- 
ticate an essentially foreign institution. It 
embodies the transplanted fancies of the 
staid burghers of Holland in conjunction 
with the predilections of the lawn-loving 
Englishman, and includes a restaurant 
more or less reminiscent of France. But 
it has been found to be unduly costly and 
adjudged to have " forced the note." Yet 
it has weekly concerts and dances which 
at all events the outer fringe of the society 
people do not hesitate to attend and par- 
ticipate in, and it witnesses one festival in 
the year to which they contribute their 
presence with the utmost cordiality — the 
annual lawn-tennis tournament. 

There are probably few prettier scenes 



The 

Summer 

Life 



27 



Newport than that of which this contest is the cen- 
tre. Perfectly trimmed lawns swept by 
the freshest and daintiest morning dresses, 
young men in flannels, rosy with health 
and irresponsibility, fashion in its freest 
and least conscious manifestations, the 
mass of *' best people " in their most at- 
tractive inadvertence, the rising seats 
around the courts clad in the most refresh- 
ing variety of clear-colored costumes 
pricked out with patches of brilliant para- 
sols, the water-color note everywhere, as a 
painter would say, and the well-groomed 
young fellows in the centre of the com- 
position obviously exhibiting both strength 
and skill — make a picture which for com- 
bined animation and refinement, both of 
actors and spectators, it would be difficult 
to match anywhere. Jean Beraud — or 
better still Raffaelli or Forain — would find 
it quite as well worth fixing as Long- 
champ, though the types, of course, are 
less various. 

Newport owes, too, to the summer res- 
ident, not only a high standard of social 
28 




In Front 
oj the 
Cusino 



life and a decorous employment of leisure, ^^^^^^ 
but also an esthetic ideal of architecture /^"''' 
and landscape gardening. Architecture 
has perhaps been as much travestied as 
illustrated. The feeblest whimsies abound. 
Reflections in frame of reverend stone 
motifs are not infrequent. The art of 
building is often caricatured in houses of 
which the only inspiration is plainly the 
desire to be conspicuous. And though 
some of the old houses, such as the Bareda 
mansion and Mr. Wetmore's palace, are 
their own excuse for being, there are not 
a few elaborate examples of exaggerated 
bad taste and worse grammar. On the 
other hand, to leave the Vanderbilt and 
other palaces quite aside, such a house as 
Richardson built for Mr. Sherman, or that 
of Mr. Marquand by Hunt, and others 
easily mentioned, form a notable leaven 
and rectify the eflTect produced by perhaps 
the predominant inapposite sportiveness. 

But there is no doubt at all of the im- 
mense service to the place rendered by the 
summer resident's landscape gardener, who 
31 



Neivport has covered broad acres of it with lawns 
and boscages, clumps of trees and bushes, 
heaps of flowery luxuriance walled in by 
privet and buckthorn, and has more than 
any other agency, except the climate and 
the natural lay of the land, exhibited the 
potentialities of elegance inherent in these 
latter. A good word should be said, in 
addition, for the way in which — often an 
awkward and somewhat absurd instrument 
in the hands of Providence — the summer 
resident has circumvented the purely util- 
itarian and ignoble activities that, left to 
themselves, would have done their disas- 
trous utmost to vulgarize Newport, wholly 
and deplorably unconscious that the life 
of the goose that lays for them such 
golden eggs was really in peril. 



The 
Old 
Totuti 



III 

THE OLD TOWN 

THE old town may be called pictur- 
esque in distinction from the general 
pictorial effect that is noticeable. It is full 
of narrow streets and quaint turnings ; 
little squares left undisturbed by the march 
of municipal improvements within their 
old-time staid and rectilinear demarca- 
tion ; trapezoidal houses built originally, 
it is evident, in exemplification of the 
sound principle that expression of function 
is the one thing needful in architecture ; 
gently inclining gambrels in themselves a 
a composition. But even its streets and 
houses, its courts, impasses, and docks have 
as detail too much character and individ- 
ual sap justly to be termed the mere 
material of a picturesque whole. They 
have none of the indeterminate and 
huddled look of the detail of Amalfi or 

33 



Newport Assisi. They make a harmony that is 
sensibly organic. They are individually 
quaint now and then, without, how- 
ever, the sharp accent that we usually 
associate with quaintness, and they fit the 
landscape " like the paper on the wall." 
Some of the narrow gambrel-roofed houses 
have gables that gaze on the streets, on 
which they often look, like human faces. 
Cotton's Court, Wanton Avenue, and 
similar places, contracted as they evidently 
are in area, have an air of complication 
and variety that tempt and would reward 
the exploring sense. Curious juxtaposi- 
tions of shop, dwelling, stable, warehouse, 
and what not form incomparable "nooks." 
The public buildings are interesting. 
The City Hall, admired by Allston, is a 
charming bit of classic, and the State 
House a colonial monument of much dig- 
nity and character. The jail, on Marl- 
borough Street, is absolutely delightful 
and characteristically domestic ; there is a 
legend of its one prisoner once complaining 
because there was no lock on her door. 

34 



In all the world probably there is nothing The 
like the Long; Wharf, with its succession ^ 
of boat-builders' shops, tenements, ignoble 
saloons, heaps of junk, sail-boat moorings 
and floats, terminating in the railway 
freight station and the steamboat wharf. 
It is hardly changed within my own recol- 
lection. Deacon GrofFs succession to 
James Hart, the boat-builder and letter, 
in whose airy shop a parliament of local 
sages meets now as it has for several dec- 
ades, amid the shavings and spars, the 
oars and " tackle," to look out over the 
harbor and speculate on the political state 
of the nation and the social state of the 
town, is the chief variation I note, and 
that is not revolutionary. On the hottest 
day there is always a breeze here, and 
much to be learned besides. 

Nor is there anything, I fancy, quite 
like Thames Street from end to end — the 
business street of the town — though its 
banks and butcher-shops, and book-stores 
and fish-markets, and hardware and dry- 
goods and haberdashery are punctuated 

35 



Ne-wport and faintly diversified with dwellings now 
and then. They have been dwellings a 
long while, and count many generations 
of probably the same families. The sub- 
dued note of age, of " silence and slow 
time," is distinctly audible, and vibrates 
gently throughout the old town, with its 
gray and white and green blinds ; but I 
must admit that of recent years there has 
been to some extent an intrusive discord 
of commercial modernity even here. The 
one-price clothing store, the bee-hives of 
humming retail industry, and the uni- 
versal emporium are foreign bodies in the 
general environment and contribute a for- 
eign color to the quaint old street — like 
an overflow of Fall River or Providence. 
But as yet they have not greatly detracted 
from the general character of the thor- 
oughfare, which is still sufficient to afford 
one of the most piquant contrasts in the 
world, I think, when the drags and dog- 
carts, the broughams and phaetons of 
fashion weave their way along its narrow 
length at what it pleases everyone's hu- 
36 



An Old 

Rcvolu- 
\ tionary 
House 




«:;- I 



morous fancy to call the shopping hour. 
Thames Street, whatever its transforma- 
tions, will indefinitely, no doubt, continue 
to perform its distinguished function of 
binding together summer and winter, 
transitory and permanent Newport with a 
notable welding force. 

The Point, too, is a part of the old 
town, and is rather neglected, which it 
should not be. It is somewhat inacces- 
sible, and anyone who lives there or in- 
habits the neighborhood for a summer has 
need, perhaps, of a horse and trap of some 
kind. But it has its advantages and qual- 
ities of its own. To begin with, it is very 
far removed from the artificial summer 
life. One may live there as much in re- 
treat as at Jamestown. Land is very cheap, 
and if I were tempted to "build " in New- 
port I am not at all sure that I should not 
select some site on the water's edge in this 
region. One could have his fill of still- 
water bathing, his cat-boat and row-boat, 
and a certain measure of seclusion wholly 
consonant with the most delightful out- 

39 



The 
Old 
Toiun 



Neivport of-doors activity and within easy reach of 
whatever is attractive in the town itself. 
A more nearly perfect embodiment of rus 
in urbe it would be difficult to find than 
the stretch of bay shore here, fringed by 
substantial houses, and an equally substan- 
tial local community that is in Newport 
but not, in the ordinary and superficial 
sense, of it. 



40 



The 

Avenue^ 
the Chff 
Walk 
and the 
IV Drl've 

. THE AVENUE, THE CLIFF WALK AND 
THE DRIVE 

\TEWPORT is longitudinally divided 
^^ by three main streets which run 
north and south. Following mainly the 
harbor line and projecting thitherward its 
many slips is Thames Street, where is al- 
most all the business of the town, extendinp- 
from the cemetery, with its characteristic 
contrast of old and new, the old slate carv- 
ings of winged cherubs' heads hard by the 
joint product of La Farge and St. Gaudens, 
to the lower end of the harbor. A few rods 
up the hill Spring Street, with its prim 
houses and old Trinity and other churches, 
parallels it, running from just above the 
Parade or Mall, where the State House is 
south to the ocean. And on the crest of 
the ridge are the nearly straight two miles 
and a half of Bellevue Avenue. At its 



Neivport north end is the romantic and trimly kept 
Jews' Cemetery, celebrated by Longfellow, 
where sleep amid flowers and cypresses 
Abraham and Judah Touro and other 
Hebrews, who amply repaid the early 
toleration and respect here extended to 
their race long before it received them 
elsewhere. Next come residences, board- 
ing-houses, a little row of lesser commerce, 
the Newport Reading-room — the club 
euphemistically so called — the Redwood 
Library, now a more hushed but less 
hospitable bookish retreat than many old 
Newporters remember it, and Touro Park, 
where the Old Stone Mill stands and a 
band plays on summer evenings. Then a 
stretch of shops till one gets to Bath Road, 
the broad street leading to the beach, the 
Casino, and the stiff, stark caravansery 
of the Ocean House just beyond. 

Here begins the succession of cottages 
and chateaux of the summer resident, set 
wide apart in elegant lawns bordered with 
hedges and blazing with flowers, that ex- 
tends for a couple of miles to the sea. 
42 



And the slope that shelves gently eastward '^^^ 
from the crest of the hill that the Avenue 
follows has also within the past few lustra 
(especially in the neighborhood of Ochre 
Point) been covered with elaborate man- 
sions, the average of whose pretensions 
exceeds perhaps that of those appertaining 
to the Avenue itself. This is the region 
— the rough parallelogram formed by the 
Avenue, the cliffs bordering the sea a half 
mile or so to the east, the southern shore, 
and an east and west line from about the 
Ocean House to a point a little south of 
the Beach — where chiefly reside the sum- 
mer people whose activities the papers 
chronicle so copiously, and where, better 
perhaps than anywhere else, an American 
may see his " young [and old] barbarians 
all at play" — to recall Arnold's application 
of the line to Oxford. The northeastern 
part of the city has grown greatly also of 
recent years, and is covered with cottages 
of modest cost and considerable architec- 
tural character. Past the Beach is another 
district whose houses, some of them ample 

43 



A-uenuCy 
the Cliff 
Walk and 
the Dri've 



Newport and elaborate, stand in notable isolation 
amid rural fields, then Paradise with its 
farm-houses, ponds, junipers and gray 
rocks, the Second Beach, and finally Sach- 
uest Point, which brings one to the Sea- 
connet River and the verge of Newport. 

All around here and north from the 
town proper delightful drives lead out into 
the island itself Six miles out is the Glen, 
an almost artificial arrangement of romantic 
nature, driving whither one may stop at 
Mrs. Durfee's for tea and wafi^es, and 
enjoy a truly English interior. Then 
there are Pebbly Beach, with its curi- 
ous geological conformations, and ro- 
mantically situated, cool and cosey St. 
Mary's Chapel, and Vaucluse and its de- 
serted close, eloquent in reflections such 
as Mr. Swinburne has crystallized in his 
incomparable " A Forsaken Garden ; " 
and no end of quaint cross-roads and long 
vistas beneath overhanging elms or be- 
tween trim poplars — the whole greatly 
vivified and highly colored by the local 
inhabitant, with his sturdy and salient 

44 



characteristics, lounging in front of coun- The 
try stores and post-offices, or jogging past ^Z"rff 
in his open wagon, smiling the while, with tvaik and 
good-natured cynicism, at any exuberance '^^ ^''''^' 
you and your party may exhibit. 

To go back to the town itself, there 
are, to begin with, the two miles and more 
of the Cliff Walk. Setting out from the 
Beach the sea is on one's left, its near 
shallows, "with green and yellow sea- 
weed strewn," and beyond its stretch of 
varying blues and purples, the long, grace- 
ful reach of Easton's Point, at the end of 
which a solitary cottage stands sentinel, 
and shimmering in the more distant haze 
the shore of Seaconnet and its neighbor- 
ing rocky islets around which the breakers 
are flashing in foam. On the right of the 
path, which undulates along its edges and 
rises and falls with its rolling unevenness, 
extends that succession of lawns which, 
more than any other feature perhaps, sets 
the pitch of Newport's elegance. 

In these smooth expanses of soft green 
glowing with unexampled profusion of 

47 



Newport aristocratic flowers, the art and nature of 
the place meet in effective fusion. So ele- 
gant is it all that one fails to note how 
high and rugged are the cliffs themselves, 
the highest on the Atlantic coast from 
Cape Ann to Yucatan. On a day of 
storm, with the waves driving in from the 
ocean and beating angrily against them, 
they are more impressive ; but they are 
always picturesque and make a striking 
dividing line between the sea, wherein the 
forces of nature are always visibly at play, 
peaceful or turbulent, and the broad shelf 
of land which the hand of man has 
moulded and decorated with the most cul- 
tivated art. Curious, is it not, that cer- 
tain proprietors of the villas to which 
these lawns appertain should have tried by 
every means to circumvent the undoubted 
riparian right of all the world to follow 
this unequalled path at its will, provided 
trespass be avoided ? They are new- 
comers, one infers, to Newport at any rate, 
if not to id omne genus, for a prolonged 
submission to Newport influences could 
48 



hardly fail to modify the Hyrcanlan hearts The 
and Boeotian brains to which in such cir- "^^'''"'' 

the Cliff 

cumstances as these monopoly could sug- waik and 

geSt itself. ^^^ T)ri-ve 

Beyond the southern extremity of the 
Cliff Walk, and extending westward to 
Castle Hill (whence one may see the 
fringe of hotels and cottages that compose 
Narragansett Pier) and Fort Adams, 
stretches out the charming region known 
of old as Price's Neck — variegated with 
ponds and embayments, hill and dale, 
rock and marsh, and skirted and reticu- 
lated with the famous Ocean Drive and 
its tributaries. The Ocean Drive is unique 
in the world ; and to my own taste its 
mingling of stimulus and suavity, its alter- 
nations of wildness and culture, its invigor- 
ating iodine-laden breezes, the sedative 
softness of its mists, the piquant aroma ot 
its huckleberry bushes, the infinite variety 
of its " effects," combine to produce an 
impression to which that left by the Cor- 
nice from Nice to Genoa is a shade sac- 
charine and monotonous. This and the 

49 



Newport Paradise country are the regions that 
appeal most, perhaps, to the few landscape 
painters who have had the sense to appre- 
ciate that in Newport they had but to 
reproduce, whereas elsewhere the heavy 
burthen of origination is generally laid 
upon them. Mr. La Farge is a notable 
exception, by the way ; and curiously, 
thus, it is the most imaginative of our 
painters who, almost alone, has illustrated 
the most pictorial landscape that we have. 
The Neck has been greatly changed 
within the last few years, and some fastid- 
ious spirits who are displeased with any 
intrusion of man into the realm of nature 
have esteemed it " destroyed." It has 
been cut up by a network of roads, it is 
true. It is no longer Rocky Farm, with 
its happy combination of wildness and 
composure, its sudden bush and brier-clad 
declivities, its stretches of marsh, and 
wide vistas of uneven but undulating 
grace. It is shorn into cultivated aspect, 
and graded into landscape art. The land- 
scape painter has, perhaps, a legitimate re- 



regret. But the nicest and most svmpa- ^^^ 
thetic taste has dictated the process, and 
the lay of the ground and its character as 
a whole have been carefully considered. 
The geologic outline has been preserved, 
and even its accidents have been appreci- 
ated as advantages instead of artificially 
circumvented. It has not lost its effect of 
local ensemble^ and the houses — the cas- 
tles, rather — now stationed on its crests 
and dominating the points of view do not 
detract from this effect, but on the other 
hand, contribute to it an element of dis- 
tinctly elegant interest. The change, at 
all events, is at the charge of the summer 
residents. To me, I confess, it is to be 
charged to their credit. 



A'vcnue^ 
the Cliff 
Walk and 
the Dri-ve 



51 



Neivport 



THE BEACH 

ANOTHER effect of the evolution of 
the summer resident as an important 
and controlhng class has been the transfor- 
mation — I was about to say the destruction 
— of the Beach. The Beach is no longer 
what it used to be. The " bathing hour," 
with all its characteristic features, has de- 
parted. You may bathe at any hour when 
you can find a " house," but it is no longer 
fashionable to bathe at all. There are a few 
private houses sometimes occupied, and 
at Bailey's Beach others whose owners 
use them very constantly, but the bathing 
at the Beach as a feature of social summer 
life is over. The carriages do not come 
down and draw up on the sand to watch 
the bathers. The place is no longer a 
rendezvous both for bathers and specta- 
tors, as, say, the plage at Trouville is. 
5^ 




Scene 
on the 
Beach 



Beach 



" Society " has abandoned it, and in gen- ^^^ 
eral, probably, confines itself to " tubbing." 
The philosophic lover of Newport must 
recognize the change as inevitable, no 
doubt, but the sentimentalist may be per- 
mitted to regret it. Perhaps it would have 
been asking too much of the summer peo- 
ple, to preserve in this respect the simplic- 
ity and really democratic elegance which 
they evinced before they became con- 
sciously so much of a force as to be un- 
easily careful with regard to even chance 
companionship. And it must be confessed 
that of late years the Beach has been in- 
vaded by people with whom fastidiousness 
may excusably find it disagreeable to min- 
gle. On Sundays it is given over to ex- 
cursionists and servants, as was quite to 
have been expected, of course, with the 
increase of Newport's general popularity 
and its facilities of access by rail and water. 
But even on week-days it has "developed" 
immensely in a popular direction. "Pa- 
vilions " that recall Coney Island more 
than old Newport have arisen, and the 
55 



Ne'wport aroma of chowder pervades them. The 
travelling photographer sets up his shanty. 
Wrapping-paper abounds, and " lunches " 
are surreptitiously munched. The sun- 
shine and salt air minister to the greatest 
good of the greatest number. Of the 
" best people " in general, onlv those who 
find the bathing hyg^ienic or positively 
pleasurable, enter the water, and only their 
immediate friends attend and observe them. 
Still I, for one, cannot help thinking 
that things might have been different but 
for the societv fiat that bathing was to be 
considered unfashionable, and that the fiat 
itself rather unnecessarily preceded any 
real occasion for it. Certainly, were the 
natural advantages of the Beach appreci- 
ated as are those of European watering 
places whose summer population is both 
popular and select, thev would be utilized 
instead of neglected. They are, as a mat- 
ter of fact, unequalled. There is but one 
natural disadvantage ; the Beach fronts 
southward, and after a storm gets more 
than its due proportion of seaweed ; and 
56 



seaweed is a distinct discount upon the 
pleasure of bathing. Otherwise it is un- 
rivalled. It is absolutely safe. It shelves 
in the gentlest gradation. The water is 
alwavs warm. Even at high tide there is 
plenty of room for carriages. The dunes 
are hi^h enough to ajfbrd protection from 
the wind when it happens to come from 
the north. It is a mile in extent and af- 
fords a driving promenade at low tide ot 
almost unique exhilaration. The "scene" 
is invariably animating. 

Indeed, it must not be supposed that in 
finding excuses for the " best people's " 
recent neglect, one really quite acquits 
them of stupidit}- in the matter — only, in 
speaking of most of their characteristic 
manifestations, one is naturally more in- 
terested in explaining them than in specu- 
lating about their intelligence and tact. 
There are plenrv of people who bathe 
daily in the season at the Beach, and have 
done so, thev and their fathers and moth- 
ers, for more seasons than most of the 
now prominent summer residents can 



Neivport count, and who get along very well both 
without the old confraternity and with the 
new popular element, with whom visual 
association only is necessary, and that in 
general more interesting than disquieting. 
But, of course, the number of persons in 
any community whose breeding is suffi- 
ciently sound to give them a sense of se- 
curity in such matters is comparatively 
limited, and however philosophic they are 
in this instance, I fancy they will welcome 
the formal social re-establishment of the 
Beach, even at the expense of the social 
differentiation by which alone perhaps this 
may have to be accomplished. 



5^ 



The 

Climate 
and the 
Landscape 



VI 

THE CLIMATE AND THE LANDSCAPE 

F^OR rheumatic and respiratory maladies 
■'• there are no doubt better cHmates 
than that of Newport, and there are others 
whose tonic properties are greater. But the 
Newport cHmate is balm to those manifold 
temperaments that are consciously or un- 
consciously threatened with any manner of 
nervous valetudinarianism. It is a poultice 
to the nerves, an anodyne to irritability, a 
sedative to excitement, and an assuagement 
of exhaustion. It not only performs the 
important function of keeping the skin 
moist, but it is balm to the tired mind. 
Arriving from New York in the early 
summer morning, the sensation of relaxed 
tension, of being swathed in soft salt damp- 
ness, of breathing the primeur of iodize 1 
air, is sybaritic. One proceeds to sleep 
like and long and often as a child. One 

59 



Neivport lyiay almost speak of quaffing deep 
draughts of dreamless repose. And in 
ensuing days the blessedness of having 
fatigue assail only the physique and spare 
the faculties is unspeakable ; one is tran- 
quilly instead of feverishly alert. 

There are "dog days," of course. From 
July 25th to September ist exertion is 
profitless and energy misplaced. The fog 
that drifts in from the southeast and strug- 
gles with the sun, vainly in the morning 
and victoriously in the late afternoon, com- 
plicates abnormally any unusually high 
temperature. It does not last long and 
oftenest is condensed by the wind's shift- 
ing to northeast into cooling downpours 
that one enjoys from piazzas, the dripping 
trees and damp fragrance of every thing hav- 
ing a distinctly tonic effect. And though it 
is in July and August that the lotos-eating, 
which the soft climate and insular atmos- 
phere make an almost universal habit in 
Newport, most prevails ; this is, as the 
French say, un petit malheur. The segre- 
toper esser felice is not really in " a smiling 
60 




Bass- 
fishing 
Stand 



mistress and a cup of Falernian " — it is, to t^' 
anyone who has ever eaten of this ambro- ^^TT 

•' ^ and the 

sia, in the lotos of Newport. More than Landscape 
anywhere else there are days here " always 
afternoon/' days on which one may even 
with a sense of elation that exceeds that of 
virtue forget what elsewhere is duty. The 
most prosaic submit to the spell of the 
place. Everyone is physically lazy with- 
out suffering mental stagnation. A larger 
proportion of Newport boys return to the 
place of their nativity, probably, than is 
true of any other even New England town 
— drawn back, after no doubt often futile 
vicissitudes in the exterior world, by the 
loadstone of its subtle attractiveness. No 
one once inoculated with its serene and 
searching charm ever thoroughly recovers 
his independence, I think. His energy 
may be sapped by it, but his spirit is 
soothed and for him the battle of life is 
won by avoiding profitless engagements 
and tempering one's ambitions. 

But more potent even than the caressing 
climate in its effect on a delicately organ- 
63 



Neivport 



ized sensorium is the Newport landscape 
—its aristocratic lines, its elegant expanse, 
its confident high-bred air as it lies stretched 
out in the sunlight or yields itself to the 
soft enfolding of sea mist. I remember a 
Newport lady writing from Athens itself 
to her little nephew at home, " Don't you 
think it is a piece of good fortune to live 
in the most beautiful place in the world ? '' 
and share her sentiment. Everything is 
pictorial ; every series of objects is an en- 
semble; the vista in any direction exceeds 
the interest of the purely picturesque— the 
picturesque with its crudity, its fortuitous- 
ness, its animated and uneasy helter-skelter. 
Nature here is conscious— by comparison 
with much of our American landscape, 
infinitely developed. She is elegant and 
reserved as well as suave, and smiles at 
one with patrician softness and delicate 
sympathy, as who should say, " To enjoy 
me depends a good deal on yourselt." ^ 

At the crest of a yellow-green elevation, 
variegated with browns and shaded with 
cool grasses, the granite elbows itself grace- 
64 



The 

Climate 
and the 



fully out of the earth and warms itself in 
the moisture-tempered sunshine. A white 
clouds rests affectionately on it as you Landscape 
look up from the hollow, truly Titian- 
esque in its depth of fulness. The sky at 
the horizon is a light blue, like a child's 
sash. Streaks of vapor are spun across 
the zenith, toward which the blue deepens 
into sapphire. The beach is white — 
white, however, over which every tint plays 
in opaline iridescence. Berkeley's rock 
stretches out purple, sage, and olive, to- 
ward the sea. The white sand dunes are 
crested with yellow sedge. Black rocks 
jut out on the sea horizon. The after- 
noon curtain of gray shadow gradually de- 
scends in front of the Purgatory ledge. 
Five or six dark dots of bathers (there is 
no " hour " for bathing at the Second 
Beach) move about in the ripple of the 
gently dissolving breakers. A wreath of 
children is running along the damp sand 
that fringes the ebb and flow, starting the 
sandpipers from tip-toeing into brief flight. 
Seaweed carts drawn by oxen and horses 
65 



Nenvport are hauling away their dripping loads at 
the other end of the two-mile crescent. 
The clouds are violet at the north hori- 
zon and white overhead, and long, grace- 
ful lines of shore frame the ever-changing 
blue-green of the ocean on two sides of 
the triangle of which the sky forms the 
third. Back from the beach is "Para- 
dise "—but indeed paradise is all around 

one. 

Or take a July morning down at Bail- 
ey's Beach, at the end of the Avenue and 
the beginning of the Ocean Drive. The 
sun illumines every cranny of the rocks. 
Above them are slopes covered with 
bright-green, shiny huckleberry bushes, 
and beyond a little grove of artistically 
placed pine saplings. Over the hill is an 
elaborately picturesque house. Seaward 
the sand glistens and sparkles, wet from 
the spray, the water folding itself over it 
in narrow hems. The rocks are seamed 
and spongified and accented with gold- 
brown seaweed, and their own local^ color 
runs the gamut from brown with pinkish 



66 



tints to cool gray, from fawn and mauve t^^^ 
to pearl. Above are the constant Titian- '^'^'f 

r ana the 

esque clouds, overflowing with opaline Landscape 
effulgence. A bloom of gray Timothy 
furze rests on the deeper green of the 
splotches of grass. The varied blue and 
green of the water whose wimples are 
winking in the sun ranges from cobalt to 
malachite. Spouting Rock is booming 
melodiously nearby. A couple of six- 
year-olds in fresh light blue cambric 
dresses are climbing an adjoining accliv- 
ity, showing in delicate contrast of values 
against the green and gray hillside. 
Around all and unifying everything the 
moist Newport air tones and centralizes 
into a true picture the various objects 
that it makes contribute to a harmonious 
color composition. 

What is especially characteristic of the 
Newport landscape is the co-operation it 
demands in the beholder's appreciation. 
It appeals to one's alertness, rather than 
to a lazy receptivity. You miss its qual- 
ity entirely if your own faculties are not 
67 



^-f- in a state of real activity. This does not 
exclude composure or imply excitement. 
There Is nothing keyed up, nothing espe- 
cially exhilarating in the soft air and suave 
prospect stretching out In every direction 
wherever one may be. Only still less Is 
there any enervation, any relaxing som- 
nolency inviting to the far niente state of 
the mind. One's soul Is distinctly " In- 
vited," not soothed In any narcotic sense. 
The appeal of the place is to an intelligent 
rather than a purely sensuous apprecia- 
tion. You know why you like It, why it 
charms and wins you, why. Indeed, It 
takes a never-to-be-disengaged hold on 
the very fibre of your affections, why you 
remember and regret It on Lake Geneva, 
in Venice, In Sorrento, why and how, in a' 
word, it Is beautiful. 



68 



The 
Harbor 



VII 

THE HARBOR 

NEWPORT Harbor is one of the best 
roadsteads in the world, being land- 
locked, easy of access, and having no bar. 
But its utilitarian advantages are slight in 
comparison with its aesthetic attractiveness. 
It is not merely one of the most, but, I 
think, from what I have heard and seen, the 
most beautiful of the world's harbors. Of 
course, such an opinion is largely a matter 
of taste, and a lover of Newport, so far 
from dissembling his partiality, is inclined 
to profess it. There are doubtless en- 
chanting fjords in Norway, and reef-pro- 
tected stretches of lovely purple water in 
the tropics ; there are the Bay of Naples, 
whose beauties no amount of cockney 
admiration can render commonplace, and 
the blue reaches around the Piraeus and 
Phalerum and Salamis. There are Con- 
69 



Neivport stantinople and the Golden Horn, and so 
on. So far as my own experience goes, 
the water view from the Athenian Acro- 
poHs gives one the nearest approach to 
the sensation produced by Newport Har- 
bor. Arriving at the Piraeus from Naples, 
the Italian drop-curtain seems to have 
lifted and disclosed a scene of natural 
beauty, in whose presence one's memory 
of the Vesuvian Bay is that of an exotic 
and artificial aspect. When the sensitive 
traveller awakes after a night on the Sound 
boat, now moored to Long Wharf, and 
notes the gradual unfolding of the placid 
prospect before him, as the summer sun 
comes up over the gray roofs and green 
trees of the town, and reveals the beautiful 
Rhode Island Harbor and its refined land- 
scape environment, he feels, to be sure, 
that his eyes, which closed the night be- 
fore on the actual world, are opening on 
the delectable phenomena of fairyland it- 
self Yet, the sense of contrast once over- 
come, the impression of the sense is 
curiously like that of the Athenian Harbor. 



There is the same commingled softness 
and freshness, the same briUiancy com- 
bined with suavity of color, the same 
gray-green envelope thinly overlaying the 
same stony geologic structure, the same 
absence of tropicality on the one hand 
and presence of exquisiteness on the other. 
Newport Harbor, however, is too ac- 
tively characteristic for even the least fan- 
ciful comparisons. As day advances it 
becomes a busy as well as a beautiful 
scene. The wharves that jut out into it, 
covered with piles of lumber and (pi- 
quantly) heaps of junk, do not attest 
great commercial agitation. But the Con- 
anicut ferry-boat issues at regular intervals 
from her slip, the Fort Adams and Tor- 
pedo Station and Coaster's Harbor 
launches ply back and forth, the Wick- 
ford and Narragansett Pier boats, and 
an ever-increasing number of excursion 
steamers from Providence, Bristol, Fall 
River, Rocky Point and Block Island 
churn their way among the yachts and 
trading-schooners at anchor ; and the fleet 

73 



The 
Hark 



Newport of cat-boats glides breezily hither and 
thither in all directions, but plainly without 
specific destination and following courses 
laid by the fancy of absolute leisure. The 
sense of life and activity is omnipresent. 
The air is salt and full of savor. Lobster- 
pot buoys bump against a passing keel 
and bob in its wake. Fishermen with 
short briar pipes and sou'westers lean 
lazily against the tillers of their boats 
coming in from " outside " laden with the 
day's catch. " Naphtha boats " spin along 
with incredible speed, puffing stertorously. 
Beyond Goat Island lies one — or two or 
^YQ — of the White Squadron, spick-span 
in the sunlight. Up at Coaster's Harbor 
the boys are drilling on the slope to the 
music of a brassy band heard faintly 
across the stretch of water. The " wash " 
of the Richmond flutters aloft. A crack 
cutter shoots by leaning over like a skater, 
and skimming the smooth water like a 
seagull. 

Sensations are of all kinds, and the 
connoisseur doubtless has his preferences. 

74 



Yachting 




For myself I know no sensuous beatitude The 
equal to that to be realized in the stern- 
sheets of a cat-boat in Newport Harbor 
of a bright August afternoon. It is so 
exquisitely poised between anodyne and 
excitant. You must know how to " sail 
a boat," and though no great seamanship 
is implied in the competent management 
of a cat-boat, in which it is said only a 
hibber or an expert navigator ever comes 
to grief, there is enough of the unexpected 
to be considered to demand constant 
attention. A reasonably spirited horse 
requires less of his rider, when you re- 
member the number of extraneities to be 
looked out for in a populous harbor, to 
say nothing of wind and weather eccen- 
tricities. You may have a party or not, 
but with your hand on the tiller, even in 
the serenest sailing it is the boat and the 
environment that furnish the acutest 
pleasure, to anyone of philosophic years at 
least. 



77 



Neivport 



VIII 

THE TOWN IN WINTER 

TN winter the town is still unique. The 
■'■ wealth of leafage has disappeared and 
the multitude of trees is even more no- 
ticeable in its bareness than in its clothed 
estate. It counts less as a restful and 
mysterious mass and emphasizes itself by 
its starkness. Myriads of sere and gray 
branches glisten in the bright sunshine 
and cast a network of shadow over the 
sidewalks and houses. Dusky spaces and 
rich boscages have given place to the 
staccato tenuity of arboreal anatomy — 
sharp accents everywhere instead of the 
soft toning of the deep green summer 
luxuriance. The quaint houses look in 
consequence insubstantial, tiny and iso- 
lated ; the background in which they were 
set and into which they fitted so cosily is 
gone, and they stand out in somewhat In- 
78 



The 

Toivn 



significant silhouette. One divines, how- 
ever, the interior comfort of contented /„'^'^,„,,^ 
hibernation. Spring, summer, and " the 
season " are coming, and even in frame 
structures and in icy weather such a pros- 
pect is sufficiently sustaining. The ma- 
cadam is rigid and furrowed by the frost. 
An occasional stretch of brick pavement 
oozes trickling rills at noonday. The 
long plank walks, interspersed with ash 
and clinker substitutes at recurrent inter- 
vals, echo crisply to an incredible distance 
the tread of a brisk pedestrian of a Sun- 
day returning from church. The air is 
absolutely still. Sounds carry miracul- 
ously. One may hear a dog bark or a 
wagon rumble as if by telephone from a 
spot beyond identification. 

After Thanksgiving and toward Christ- 
mas a silver sheen succeeds the autumn 
bloom as this in its time had overlaid the 
summer warmth and soft suffusions of 
color. On a brisk December day, which 
begins with ringing clearness and crisp- 
ness, it takes the sun but an hour or 

79 



Newport two to bring everything into a harmony, 
whose keynote, higher than at any other 
season here, is yet of a mellower brilliance 
than elsewhere in America at this time a 
similar temperature suffers. The lotos- 
eating season is over, plainly, yet there is 
the same agreeable absence of demand on 
any specific energies as in summer. The 
envelope of color — that delightful garment 
that Newport never puts off — is as evi- 
dent to the senses as in mid-summer, 
though more silvery in quality, as I said. 
At noon there is positive warmth — a glow 
that one enjoys the more for feeling a 
little as if one had earned it, with other 
than the hot-house enervation born of 
whiffs of roses and orange trees and 
tempting one to forget the season instead 
of improve it that is characteristic of Can- 
nes and San Raphael. The water is blue, 
beautifully blue, but of a hue more 
marked by crispness than suavity and full 
of character. There are no breakers, as 
earlier in the season, or as in and after 
foul weather, but the ceaseless folding over 
80 



and self-hemming of the long, tranquil ^^^ 
waves in regular recurrence is eloquent .^^ ^^.^^^. 
to the eye, as their faint but voluminous 
sound is to the ear, of the steady pulsa- 
tions of the Atlantic, beside which the 
plashing ripple of the Mediterranean seems 
special and occasional. 

Over the eastern hill and out at Para- 
dise the turf is grown dry and brown with 
the frost, yet the sense perceives that 
Nature is only sleeping, and notes an 
absence of that mortuary aspect which she 
wears at this season in New England gen- 
erally. The summer delicacy of color has 
grown, in steady autumnal gradation, 
diaphanous to the verge of dreariness, but 
has stopped there without overstepping 
the line. The slopes and fields and 
stretching marshes are not grayed into 
desolation, but harbor here and there, in 
little dells and hollows, or even more 
minutely vinder the lee of hummocks and 
tufts of herbage, warm hues and hints 
of green, color evidences of life reminis- 
cent of summer luxuriance, and softening 

8i 



Nttvport the austerity of the prospect with an 
undertone of deeper and richer hue. And 
in key with this background the wealth of 
Paradise cedars and junipers contribute 
their evergreen freshness and vitahty, and 
attest the vigor of the deep-lying sap of 
Newport earth, the consciousness of whose 
presence prevents one from 



-petting 



About the frozen time." 

The sky, which always unites every 
detail under it into a pictorial composition 
in Newport, counts in winter more than 
ever in the fading competition of elements 
terrestrial. It is cloudless and of a soft 
cobalt hue during the early part of the day, 
if the sun be shining and if the curtain of 
gray mist and cold colorlessness, which of 
course, drops in winter with more fre- 
quency and less charm than in the sum- 
mer season, be lifted. But noon once past, 
on these bright winter days, a soft glow- 
ing light creepingly suffuses the western 
sky, and is faintly reflected in the eastern 
firmament. The most delicate of yellow- 
82 



greens imaginable is quietly distributed as ^^^ 
background, upon which purple cirrhus ^^''^^^ 
clouds speedily spread themselves in long, 
feathery plumes. Then the zenith be- 
comes sapphire, flushed at the fringe with 
salmon and pink wreaths of vapor. Fila- 
ments of mauve stretch themselves in 
haphazard fret-work across the heavens. 
The eastern half of the vault takes on a 
pervasive rose-leaf tint of pink. Then, 
as the sun sinks and the temperature falls 
and twilight comes on, there is a sudden 
burst of deep-red, that fades out into 
infinitely long horizontal ribbons of 
orange; the zenith grows dull and declines 
in lead color ; when finally the sun dis- 
appears beneath the rolling stretches of 
Conanicut, the clouds become more and 
more diaphanous and fade away into ever- 
lasting ether, that now shows itself unfath- 
omable and austerely blue, with two or 
three stars just blinking themselves into 
the reach of human vision. 

Walk down quaint and quaintly-called 
" Wanton Avenue " — an alley bordered 
83 



Nt^port y^\x\Y picturesque and preposterous frame 
buildings, one inhabited by an old New- 
port " character ;" the next a storeroom ; 
the next a boat-house — and look out over 
the incomparable harbor at such an hour 
as this — the hour of a winter sunset with 
the shades of night drawing themselves 
slowly together over the lovely scene. 
The water is steel-blue — a hard and chil- 
ling light reflected from its fretful wavelets. 
White cat-boats and sloops anchored near 
by bob briskly with the desultory rise and 
fall of the breeze-roughened water. There 
are faint red lights struggling with the 
coming obscurity and the dying daylight 
on Goat Island. Fort Adams is a dark 
and not unromantic mass of sombre lateral 
extension. The cold has blended all col- 
ors into a harmony of frigid witchery. 
Familiar objects — the City Wharf, with an 
unloading coal-schooner alongside ; Al- 
ger's and Groff's rickety piers ; the vast 
white mass of an Old Colony steamboat 
lying next the end of Long Wharf; the 
chimney of the torpedo station on Goat 
84 



Island — take on a romantic aspect as the '^'"^ 
accidents of a purely artistic and imma- ."^"3 
terial ensemble. An hour or two later the 
boat leaves for New York. It is as hard 
to take it and leave this permanently 
enchanted spot, as if the season were 
midsummer. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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